His Face in Every Crowd

Daniel Diamond left his hometown of Lansing, Michigan in 1972 to move to New York City. Gay life in New York became the subject of much of his poetry, published in more than a dozen privately printed, limited-edition chapbooks. Diamond's poems appeared during his lifetime in the anthologies A True Likeness: Lesbian & Gay Writing Today and The Son of the Male Muse, and posthumously in Between the Cracks: The Daedalus Anthology of Kinky Verse and Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS. An expanded essay, Delicious: A Memoir of Glenway Wescott, recounted his association with the award-winning novelist. Diamond died from AIDS in 1996.

"In His Face in Every Crowd, editor Philip Clark has recollected and reclaimed the literary voice and achievements of Daniel Diamond, whose mostly confessional poetry was some of the earliest attestations to the struggles of (a) gay life stitched from Michigan to Manhattan, from the late 70s through the early AIDS era. Clark's selection of Diamond's work is deftly cartographic, mapping the poet's creative shifts, trails of passions, and ground-quaking despair as he fought to survive and thrive in unmerciful New York City. I'm so thankful for a collection such as this, which more than insists on both a place in LGBTQ history and a spot in the sky for one of our lesser-known ancestors as a literary lodestar." —Daniel W.K. Lee, author of Anatomy of Want

"Daniel Diamond wrote from inside a queer world too many did not live long enough to remember. Intimate, erotic, funny, and devastating, these poems preserve not only the losses of a generation but its desires, friendships, defiance, and daily life. His Face in Every Crowd returns an essential voice to our literary history and reminds us how much disappears when we fail to keep our poets alive on the page." —Emanuel Xavier, author of Still, We Are Sacred

Philip Clark is co-editor of the anthology Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS and the collections In the Empire of the Air: The Poems of Donald Britton and Invisible History: The Collected Poems of Walta Borawski, which won the 2023 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry. A 2018 MacDowell Fellow, he is completing a biography of the publisher and First Amendment pioneer H. Lynn Womack.